The other soldier looked at the pitifully small bits of concrete he'd managed to break loose. He looked at Dan. His wave of invitation was almost a bow. “Go for it, man.”
“I will, as soon as I…” Dan snapped his fingers. The Elvish word did come back to him! He pointed at the doorway, even though he had no idea whether that made any difference. “ Mellon!” he said.
Silently and without any fuss, the door swung open.
Valley soldiers did guard the west-facing approaches to West-wood. Liz supposed that made sense. With all the fighting the day before, the Westsiders might have tried to sneak a column through the dead zone. But she'd hope she and her folks would be able to get into Westwood and start selling their jeans before the occupiers noticed they were around.
No such luck. The soldier who seemed to pop up out of nowhere didn't have a matchlock. He carried an Old Time rifle. His U.S. Army helmet was two lifetimes old. “Halt!” he called, and his voice said they'd belter do it. “Who are you people, and what are you doing here?”
“Whoa!” Dad called to the horses. He pulled back on the reins. The animals stopped. Then he said, “We were coming up here with a load of denim pants-genuine Old Time Levi's, fresh like they were made yesterday-when all the shooting started. We couldn't go through, so we went around. And here we are.”
“ Levi 's fresh like yesterday, huh?” The rifleman laughed.
“I've heard traders sling it before, but you've got more nerve than anybody. How about telling me one I'll believe?”
“Pull out a pair, Liz,” Dad said, cool as a superconductor. “Let Doubting Thomas here see for himself.”
“Sure.” Liz scrambled over the seat and into the back of the wagon. She grabbed a pair of jeans and showed them to the soldier. “See? With a zipper and everything.” The only trousers in this alternate that didn't close with buttons used zippers recycled from Old Time clothes. But not many zippers still worked, and not many tailors bothered with them. Buttons did the job. Zippers were mostly for show, the way cuff buttons on suit jackets were in the home timeline.
Before asking for a closer look, the Valley soldier called. “Hey, Harvey!”
“Yo!” A voice came from nowhere. “What's happening, man?”
“Cover me. I need to check something out.”
“You got it.” Harvey still didn't show himself.
“Now let me see those jeans,” the soldier who'd challenged the wagon told Liz. She didn't make any sudden moves when she handed them to him. Maybe his father was a tailor, or maybe he was when he didn't carry a gun. He felt the fabric. He held the pants up against the sun to see if they had any thin spots. He worked the zipper several times and peered at the way it was sewn to the rest of the fly. The more he examined them, the more surprised he looked.
“See?” Liz said.
“Yeah.” The Valley rifleman seemed to nod in spite of himself. “Unless this is just one supercool pair to show people… You've got a whole bunch of these in the back there?”
Liz nodded. “You better believe it. Look for yourself if you want to. We're no ripoff artists.” She made herself sound angry, the way a trader who'd been unfairly challenged naturally would.
“I'll do that.” the soldier said. His expression said a lot of the people who protested hardest were the biggest thieves. That only made Liz mad for real. Nobody liked getting called a liar, even if just by a raised eyebrow.
And she wasn't lying. She walked around to the back of the wagon and pointed to the big old stack of Levi's. “Go ahead. Pick any pair you want.”
The rifleman trusted her far enough to sling his weapon for a moment, anyhow. He leaned forward and pulled a pair out of the middle of the stack. He gave them the same once-over he had with the ones Liz offered him. When he finished, he said, “Well, I take my hat off to you.” And he really did lift the old-fashioned steel pot off his head. “These are the real McCoy. I don't know where you found 'em, but I bet we'll want to buy 'em. Pass on, Miss. Pass on.”
They didn't go to the market square just south of the UCLA campus. Thai was too close to their old house. There was another market square, a ritzier one, north of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. The only reason that square was ritzier was that the neighborhood had been ritzier before the Fire fell-and still was.
As Dad guided the horses towards it, he said, “If we were proper traders, we'd go to the other market. It's bigger, and there are more Valley soldiers around.”
“All the more reason for staying away,” Mom said.
“That's what I was thinking,” Dad agreed. “The people who do buy from us may think we're kind of dumb for setting up there, but they won't think we're anything more than kind of dumb.”
“You hope,” Mom said.
Dad nodded. “You bet I do.”
“It's not too bad,” Liz said. “The library's up near the north end of campus. We won't be any farther from it than we were before… as long as the librarians don't tip off the Valley soldiers as soon as I go in there.”
“I know it can happen. I hope it won't,” Dad said. “They're all people who've been there since the City Council ran things. Maybe there's a quisling or two, but we can hope not, anyhow. With a little luck, we'll get the job done yet.”
“That would be good,” Liz said.
“That would be wonderful,” Mom said. “Not seeing this alternate again wouldn't break my heart.”
“Get used to it, hon. If we land another grant, we'll be back one of these days,” Dad said. By the look on her face, Mom had no trouble curbing her enthusiasm. Ignoring her expression, or at least pretending to, Dad went on, “That's what happens when you have an academic specialty: you keep coming back to it. I'll be coming back here when the beard I'm not wearing right now is all white-if I can keep getting grant money.”
“And if you don't have WANTED posters with your face on them in every little kingdom from Frisco all the way down to Teejay,” Mom added.
“Well, yes, there is that.” By the look on his face. Dad kind of liked the idea. He glanced over at Liz. “Of course, by then we won't have Liz to help get us in trouble.”
“Hey, what are you blaming me for? You were the one who decided to hide Luke,” Liz said.
“Yeah, but if Dan didn't think you were cute, none of the other Valley soldiers would have paid any special attention to us,” Dad said.
“I can't help that!” Liz knew her voice went higher and shriller than she would have liked.
“I didn't say you could,” Dad answered, which was… sort of true. “But you won't come to this alternate to stir up the boys here by the time my beard's all white. You'll be through with school by then, and you'll find some other alternate to be especially interested in-or maybe something in the home timeline: who knows?-and then you'll-”
“If you say I'll stir up the boys there-well, don't say it, that's all,” Liz broke in.
'“You can't prove I was going to,” Dad said.
“You're lucky she can't, too,” Mom told him. “If she could, you'd be in even more trouble than you've already got yourself into.”
“And they said it couldn't be done!” Dad sounded proud of himself for being such a pest. He probably was. He's not the stuffy kind of professor, anyway, Liz thought. That would be worse… I think.
Dad sure wasn't stuffy after they got set up in the Brent-wood market square. He put some Levi's out on a card table with folding legs that could have come from the Old Time. (Like the jeans, it really came from the home timeline.) Then he started yelling and carrying on about how wonderful they were. He even pulled out a bugle. Heaven only knew where he'd got that. Maybe from the Stoyadinoviches? Wherever, he blew a long, tuneless blast on it. He couldn't have been hokier if he tried. And he was trying… all kinds of ways.